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Do you find Techical Analysis to be an effective way of increasing the returns on your investments? This can be either by itself, or in combination with other indicators. If so, what techniques do you use?

What studies exist which show evidence for whether or not different techniques work?

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The Wikipedia page you link has a dozen academic papers covering various sides of the argument, so if you want to know "what studies exist" you can start there. If this is instead meant to be a poll of "do current Money SE participants use technical analysis?" then it's not a very good question, as it will just depend on who happens to answer. – poolie Dec 22 '10 at 7:28

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The short answer is No.

Read the book A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

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I have, I was looking for other perspectives. Also, can you remove or edit the image, something that big is a bit obnoxious. Thanks. – DanTilkin Dec 22 '10 at 2:59
@DanTilkin, not sure what you mean. Are you saying that you are looking for specific evidence that proves that TA actually works, despite contrary evidence from academic studies? – Graviton Dec 22 '10 at 3:19
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Great book. Another good one is "Fooled by Randomness". See amazon.com/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Chance-Markets/dp/… and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fooled_by_Randomness – Chris W. Rea♦ Dec 22 '10 at 15:04
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I have to give this -1. You're citing a book originally published in 1973 as evidence. That's a long time in that industry; back then, "asset allocation" was all the rage. Today, most technical traders use highly sophisticated and computationally-expensive algorithms that weren't possible or even imaginable back then. The NASDAQ had just been born in 1971 and straight-through processing didn't exist until I think the 1990s. For counterpoint see Non-random Walk Down Wall Street. – Aaronaught Dec 26 '10 at 2:48
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You can't say that something is "not what TA is all about" without even making a cursory attempt to define what you think TA is all about or how those methods differ. And transaction costs are dirt cheap these days; a $10 round-trip fee is not much of a game-changer. We're not talking about sub-penny arbitrage here; if you make just 1 cent per share on the trade then you only need to turn around 1000 shares to recover the transaction cost, and most trading programs do way better than that. – Aaronaught Dec 26 '10 at 16:17
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